All That Is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement

Focusing on US military burn pits in Iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of US war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. In interviews about their experiences of burn pits at Joint Base Balad, a city-sized US military base located in Yathrib, Iraq, US veterans living along the US Gulf Coast linked their exposures to the toxicity of burn pits in Iraq with petrochemical exposures in their everyday lives at home. These links forged a chemical kinship with domestic others, while largely overlooking such kinship with Iraqis who share veterans' body burden. Yet I suggest that in these veterans' attention to logistics and infrastructure lies the possibility of a more expansive account of chemical kinship, one that cuts across the racialized distinctions of foreign and domestic, and gendered imaginaries of the domestic as a comfortable space for the reproduction of homophilic kin. I describe this dual imperative of the domestic as an ideology of domestic security. The toxicity of burn pits helps us to undermine this ideology of domestic security, opening new spaces to reckon with the relation between US and Iraqi experiences of US military toxicity.

Since the beginning of the US-led, post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military installations there have routinely disposed of everyday waste by burning it in open-air pits. Everything from plastic water bottles and uniforms to batteries, ammunition, human waste, and medical waste was disposed of this way, bulldozed into pits, doused in JP-8 jet fuel, and set alight, blazing more or less around the clock for years on end and potentially exposing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of US personnel and contractors, uncounted third-country nationals, as well as local civilians and their surrounding environments to particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, dioxins, sulfur oxides, and other pathogenic substances in the resulting plumes of smoke.

The burning of waste has long been a standard military procedure, intended to preserve hygiene, to deny materials to the enemy, and to increase mobility. But in previous eras, wars were fought in a more austere mode creating less day-to-day waste to be disposed of. For example, while the trenches of World War I (WWI) were certainly filthy, the waste that accumulated there was largely unavoidable, much of it from spent shell casings. Among British forces, so called “sanitary men” were tasked with collecting and sorting recyclable metals so scarce resources would not go to waste (“How to Keep Clean and Healthy in the Trenches,” n.d.).

The post-9/11 fires, however, represent the use of an old solution for a new problem: excess waste generated by massive operating bases and suppled through private contracts, sprawling complexes of concrete and steel constructed as semi-permanent cities that were part of a uniquely US post-9/11 strategy, most fully realized in Iraq. As Dale, a former medic told me, “they built American cities [in Iraq] so people could commute to war.” While there were also many smaller outposts where conditions were more austere (especially in Afghanistan), and where the burn pits where much smaller, even these pits contained materials—like plastic water bottles and e-waste—that were simply not part of previous eras. Thus, not only are the post-9/11 burn pits far larger than the fires of wars past, but, literally carved into the landscape and burning the excesses entailed by post-9/11 US war-making in situ for years on end, the pits conjure smoke full of new kinds of toxicants readily absorbed into bodies and environments that surround them. All this adds up to differences in both quantity and kind from the smoke of military fires past.

This smoke is a specific collateral (but by no means accidental) effect of the logistics of contemporary US war-making, a kind of war-making characterized not by austerity, efficiency, and resource scarcity, but by the consumptive drive, excess, disposability, and infrastructure of late-industrial capitalism that have given shape to these wars.¹

Embedded in this new smoke, both in the composition of its particulates, as well as the infrastructural and waste logics that made the pits possible, is also a set of displacements familiar to the structure of slow violence (Nixon 2011): displacements of harm, toxicity, and risk. Displacements that create new zones of slow death (Berlant 2007). But there is also, I suggest, a displacement of relations, a necropolitical refraction of what Vanessa Agard-Jones (2016) calls “chemical kinship”: “a narrative about contamination, accountability, and communities of chemical injury inspired by [a toxicant's] circulation in the bodies of people both powerful and marginalized”(see Murphy 2017; Chen 2011). In 2017 I began a collaborative ethnographic research project focused on US veterans' experiences of burn-pit-exposure-related illnesses, illnesses that were difficult to diagnose, and, at the time, often not recognized by Veterans Affairs (VA) as service connected (MacLeish and Wool 2018). Across visits, interviews, and conversations with veterans, caregivers, and advocates in Texas and Louisiana, I was struck by the repeated linkages my US veteran interlocutors made between their experiences of exposure in Iraq and the rampant forms of petrochemical toxification we all lived with along the US Gulf Coast.

Following this thread, I want to highlight the ways that veterans readily and creatively claimed chemical kinship with those exposed to petrochemical toxicity within the domestic United States, while relations of chemical kinship with Iraqis seemed not so close at hand, despite being materially linked by the self-same exposures. That is, despite a keen awareness of late-industrial infrastructures and global logistics that revealed regional forms of petrochemical kinship along the US Gulf Coast, chemical relations that were spread across the racialized divide of foreign and domestic didn't seem to call forth such recognition. And yet, I suggest that these accounts contain other possibilities precisely because of their awareness of logistics, “whose space contrasts powerfully with the territoriality of the nation state” (Cowen 2014, 8-9), and of infrastructure, which, anthropologist Ashanté Reese (2022) notes, may contain socially reparative possibilities in the ways in crumbles.

Inspired by this Special Section's call to interrogate the domesticity of war, I suggest we might consider this concatenation of displacement under the rubric of domestic security. By domestic security, I mean to invoke both the racialized geopolitical spatialization of domestic vs. foreign that seeks to sever the US home front from its military operations overseas (see Lutz 2001), as well as the related idea of the domestic as oikos, a gendered space classically devoted to the reproduction of normative forms of kinship and private property, and distanced from the public domain of politics. I specify the “racialized divide of foreign and domestic” because, as I elaborate below, there is something about US domesticity—especially when framed within the US military's long-standing claims to be a race-neutralizing path to the middle-class American Dream—that seems to make chemical kinship across racialized divides within the US more available for veterans to claim, while making chemical kinship across the racialized divide of foreign and domestic less so.

A key intervention of feminist scholarship has been to upend the distinction between public and private by noting the ways that the labors of domestic reproduction are central to capitalist reproduction (Costa and James 1975; Davis 1983;Enloe 1990; Federici 1975). I think in particular of Black feminist work that highlights the centrality of nationalism within this imagined domestic space, noting how notions of family are central to the racial project of nationalism (Collins 1998), as well as the ways that the white supremacy central to the US national project aligns property and paternity, violently harnessing while simultaneously delegitimating Black women's reproductive capacity (Davis 1983; Roberts 1998; Spillers 1987; Weinbaum 2019). Alongside this is other queer and feminist work tracing how the projects of the state are entwined with the most seemingly private of spaces (Berlant 1997; Canaday 2009; McClintock 1995; Povinelli 2006). Writing about the central project of domestication in modern counterinsurgency wars—including the US-led war in Iraq—feminist international relations scholar Patricia Owens (2015) suggests that governance, through what she calls oikonomia, highlights the continuity between contemporary counterinsurgencies—-or, in the case of Iraq what anthropologist Kali Rubaii (2021) calls counter-resurgency—and earlier colonial projects carried out with both martial violence and the deployment of weapons of domestication such as soap (McClintock 1995, 207-31) and clocks (Stevenson 2014, 129-47).

By invoking a concept of “domestic security” informed by toxicity and its displacements, I point to a geopolitical sense of the domestic as severed from the foreign, no matter the material, historical, or chemical links between them. This is a sense of domesticity that reproduces “foreign” territory as available for displacements of waste and toxicity and simultaneously as a space for the reproduction of (racialized) kinship.

What, then, does this double valance of domestic security have to do with the logics and logistics of post-9/11 US war-making and its toxic harms? When Dale, the medic, says that the military built US cities in Iraq so soldiers could “commute to war,” he is invoking the suburban spatiality of the daily commute. Not only is this a gendered spatiality in which work and politics (and their hazards) are sequestered from the safety of home, but it is a raced and classed spatiality, a legacy of white flight. The rise of the suburbs, like the toxic displacements that produce sacrifice zones and the comparatively recent processes of gentrification, is as Marisa Solomon notes, a set of “processes within a longer history of racial capitalism in which the project to value and de-value (land, people, labor, objects) helps to determine the place of waste (whose neighborhood, whose city), where it leaves, and where it 'belongs'” (2019, 77). In light of this context, Dale's comment was profoundly astute.

One of the central forces that shaped the US footprint in Iraq (and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan) was the political imperative to keep US soldiers not only safe, but also comfortable—or at least to generate the trappings of comfort. This manifest in large military bases surrounded by concrete T-walls and barbed wire that some soldiers hardly left for the duration of their tours.² Haunted from its start by the televised “quagmire” of Vietnam, and fueled by a military force that had for decades been recruited through post-racial promises of class mobility and enfranchisement in the American Dream (Pérez 2015; Wool 2021), these bases and the provisions within them performed a spectacle of security and comfort. In a simulacrum of the privatized suburban domestic security that Dale's comment invoked, images of on-base Subway sandwich shops and Burger Kings were broadcast around the world.

Of course, the bases were hardly such suburban oases. The conditions were certainly less austere than they might have been, and bases were readily supplied with food and clean drinking water unlike many of the US-decimated Iraqi towns and cities around them. But, unlike the secure domestic spaces imagined at the end of a long day's commute, US bases were often fired on by mortars, soldiers mostly slept in modified shipping containers, and there was generally no access to flush toilets.

The sense that these bases were a simulacrum of sorts that attempted—and never quite succeeded—to fold the domestic into the foreign was central to how soldiers understood and inhabited them. Heather, a medical officer who had also been stationed at Joint Base Balad (JBB), recalled the movie theater on base that was stocked with popcorn. “It was just nice to kind of get away and like fool yourself into thinking that you were anyplace other than where you were,” she said, evoking both the base's aspirational domesticity along with its failure to produce the proper spatializations of home and work or here and away. This simulacrum relied on a “perverse infrastructural loop” (MacLeish and Wool 2022), where supply infrastructures made available many of the trappings of late-capitalist comfort—from bottled water to video game consoles—but the corresponding waste infrastructures were partial at best, literally fueling the burn pits. The burn pits show how this loop manifested as an involution of the usual colonial spacializations of waste and war violence in the US.

Max Liboiron (2021) argues that “pollution is colonialism” in part because of the presumption of non-Indigenous access to Indigenous land that is transformed into a devalued “away” where waste can be sent from a “here.” This presumption of access to land is central to the US's empire of bases (McCaffery 2009; Vine 2015) and its toxification of sites of military incursion around the world (Rubaii 2020; Santana 2002; see also O'ahu Water Protectors' #ShutDownRedHill campaign). While the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq explicitly attempted to externalize post-9/11 war violence, the externalization of waste and toxicity could not be replicated within the “domesticity” of the bases themselves.

While waste wasn't displaced from the bases, the emerging discourse of burn pit exposure is displacing the chemical kinship the pits produced between US veterans and the local populations who were, and remain, exposed both to the pits as well as the lasting toxification that is central to how late-industrial war works. But while discourse around US veterans' exposure to the pits figures veterans as a unique population of biological citizens entirely unrelated to the Iraqis or Afghanis who share their body burden, in listening carefully to veterans' accounts of the pits, I hear the possibility of an alternative account, an account that might be up to the task of articulating these relations and reworking the arrangement of bio-and necro-politics through which burn pits are increasingly emerging as a matter of concern in the US. I locate this possibility in veterans' talk about the material life of the pits themselves—that is, talk about infrastructure and logistics—which I would roughly distinguish from talk focused on consequences of the pits in the form of environmental illness.

Writing about the proliferation of microplastics throughout the biosphere, Liboiron (2021) offers the imperative “pollution is colonialism,” by which they note that the assumption of access to land, air, and water that is fundamental to colonialism is the same assumption of access on which pollution relies. To say “toxicity is war” is to suggest we not only think of toxicity as an effect of war, but that we think of large-scale toxification—even outside of war zones or apparently military uses—as an essential feature of the apparatus of war-making formed by late-industrial capitalism in the US.

After all, three-quarters of a century ago, in her dire warning about the indiscriminate use of pesticides—or biocides, as she proposed we call them—Rachel Carson ([1962] 2002) noted that war was the raison d'être of synthetic chemistry itself. Indeed, it is hard to find a toxicant that isn't connected to war, from the ur-toxicant of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT)—first put to use to protect US soldiers in Naples from typhus and then to control endemic malaria in an early mission of militarized humanitarianism (Conis 2017; Stapleton 2005)—to the dizzying array of breathtaking chemicals that stock our hardware stores and linger under our kitchen sinks. These domestic chemicals, born of war, are a central feature of late modern domesticity whose assertions of cleanliness reek of colonial hygiene campaigns and their attendant biopolitics as much as they do volatile organic compounds.

Various senses of this continuum of ostensibly war-related and ostensibly civilian toxicities has appeared in interviews I've carried out in Texas and Louisiana with US veterans who were exposed to burn pit smoke in Iraq. In particular, I was surprised that, when talking about their overseas exposures, a number of them evoked a proverbial plant down the river, some industrial, state-side polluter that is spewing toxicants into the air, land, and water closer to home.

Heather, the former medical officer who had been stationed at JBB, was one of these veterans attuned to more proximate forms of toxicity. She noted that while she didn't actually understand the mechanisms through which toxicants made people sick, it was “common sense” that they did, whether those toxicants came from the burn pits in Iraq or from other sources near home in Houston. Heather said, “I assume we're being polluted by stuff going on in Deer Park and Pasadena right now,” referring to two petrochemical dense towns on Houston's eastern edge. “There's just all the [chemical] plants, and all the weird stuff, like, I can't see that far. I can't see the smoke plumes out there but I know they're there. I just assume this is all the carcinogenic coast.” Invoking a “we,” Heather brings me into the fold of her exposures, along with the rest of us living along the “carcinogenic coast,” a term that generally indicates the stretch of the Gulf of Mexico arcing below Houston, from the mouth of the Mississippi River at New Orleans in the east to the start of the Houston Ship Channel in Galveston, perhaps stretching as far west as the massive Valero refinery in Corpus Christi.

Josh, another Houston veteran who had been stationed at JBB, says that cancer doesn't run in his family but, he tells me in a matter-of-fact way, he's “100% certain” that he will get it, and when he does, it will be because of his military exposures—the burn pit but also the twelve years he spent inhaling exhaust fumes from military vehicles. But he also wonders how much of the allergies he developed after leaving the military are due to the burn pits, and how much is just the nature of breathing in Houston, where he moved after he got out.

For both Heather and Josh, as for other veterans, even in the multiply toxified era characterized by the “shared condition” of “chemically altered living-being” (Murphy 2017), there is a sense that it will be the toxicity of the pits that tips the scales or triggers a biological chain reaction—an embodied certainty amid the uncertainties of toxic risk. Yet, at the same time, veterans like Heather and Josh intuit resonances between military exposures overseas and industrial exposures at home, rendering military exposures less exceptional and insinuating them into a more familiar landscape of domestic toxicity.

That anyone living in eastern Texas or western Louisiana might be especially attuned to the hazards of the chemosphere should not be surprising. From the “carcinogenic coast” to “Cancer Ally”—the stretch of the Mississippi River running from Baton Rouge to New Orleans—this is one of the more toxic zones of the US, and those of us who have lived there are aware of this in a variety of everyday ways. I think of the emergency flood notification I received the week I moved to Houston in 2015 warning me to stay away from pooling water because of “poisonous snakes, fire ants, and chemicals,” and the way a sixty-five-year-old friend born and raised in the city blamed her accumulated exposure to the city's bad air for increasing allergies and sinus problems. And then there are the more spectacular events that periodically remind us of the hazards that loom around us—from the San Jacinto River fire in which the river was inundated with blazing petrochemicals that spewed out of broken pipes during the flood of 1994, to a broken barge that, in May 2018, oozed 11,000 barrels of oil into the ship channel that connects Houston to Galveston Bay.

In fall of 2018, a few months after my interview with Josh, he sent me a trove of pictures he'd taken of the smoke from the burn pits at JBB, including one where he jokingly turns up his head and wafts in the aroma and particulates of the towering plume of smoke rising the background. In another image, massive concrete T-walls rise some twenty feet, creating mazelike gravel-floored corridors in the open air. A pair of soldiers in Physical Training uniforms walk by, and another in his Desert Combat Uniform walks towards the camera. Containerized buildings are visible in the background, and over the whole scene blooms a billowing plume of dark grey smoke.

About four months later, a fire at a chemical storage facility in Deer Park sent a plume of black smoke hovering over Houston for three days. Deer Park is one of the places Heather had named, presciently it turned out, when describing the invisible carcinogenic stew in which we were awash. The fire made that stew frighteningly visible. As it burned, Josh sent me an email that read, “Balad, Iraq, called...They want their burn pit back.” He included a tryptic of photographs he'd taken from his car during his morning commute showing the grey smoke spreading across the morning sky.

Heather and Josh point to the resonances between toxic exposures in Iraq and in Houston, and also to the way those exposures become indistinguishable within their own bodies, from Josh's allergies to a lump on Heather's back that she delayed getting checked, worried might be cancer caused by her exposures. In this, they invite us to think about war through the global geography of late industrialism, and of petrochemical infrastructures in particular. But while one could trace the petrochemical links between Balad and Houston, it is striking that this is not quite what they do. Rather, they suggest a set of resonances that abridge the processes and infrastructures and histories that link foreign and domestic terrains. The burn pit was there. The burn pit is here. Balad called and wants it back. Heather in particular links her exposures to those that have given rise to local struggles over environmental justice on the carcinogenic coast, bringing me into the fold of chemical kinship. Josh sends me pictures of the sky we both see on our way to work, inviting me to let my domestic experience resonate with his experience downrange. But even in the midst of these subtle considerations of the geographies of exposure they have inhabited, the chemical kinship between them and the Iraqis whose lands they occupied, who, in some cases, they worked alongside, never occurs. Those relations remain circumscribed by a geography of domestic security that reasserts the “awayness” not only of Iraq but also of Iraqis. Josh, Heather, and I are all white, and certainly my whiteness, along with my US citizenship, allow this configuration of kin and absented Others to go untroubled. I want to mark the fact that in the domestic case, their claims to chemical kinship cross racial lines, while in the foreign case, they are not claimed at all. We might read this as a privilege of whiteness—a privilege to choose to ignore the social and material structurations of racial difference, environmental racism, and US imperialism. We might simultaneously read it as a comment on just how total a difference can be produced by a racial geopolitics of foreign and domestic.

Devin was deployed to Iraq as a radio operator in 2005, where he was exposed to burn pit smoke in the relatively close quarters of a small tactical operating center in central Iraq, occupied by a few hundred Iraqi and American troops. In 2015, nine years after this exposure, Devin suddenly developed fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and chronic fatigue syndrome. For these, as well as a slew of other diagnoses, including traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, he has received a 100 percent disability rating from the VA. The rating is “complete and total,” meaning his level of impairment is not expected to improve.

In their extensive research about burn pits and their related illnesses, Devin and his husband Stephen, who now live a few miles outside New Orleans, came across a news story about “a chemical plant up river from here [that] manufactures a substance called chloroprene.” Though they didn't know it, they were referring to the only chloroprene plant in the US, formerly owned by DuPont and now operated by the Japanese company Denka, located in historically Black St. John Parish. Chloroprene is the main ingredient in neoprene and used in a variety of industrial applications, including machine parts, electrical wiring, and waterproof adhesives. In 2010 it was classified as a likely carcinogen and the acceptable level of exposure set at 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air, a level far below extant concentrations, which became a rallying cry for community activists.

In addition to cancers—cancer risks in the immediate area are the highest in the country and roughly seven hundreds times the national average (US EPA 2016; Hersher 2018)—residents of the town of LaPlace where the plant is located have documented other ailments, including “acute bronchitis, coughing, sinusitis, nasal polyps, wheezing, cardiac problems, nausea, vomiting, headaches, fatigue, anxiety, insomnia and hair loss” (Reimann and Hasselle 2019).They have been required to produce this list as they seek remedy in class-action suits in local courts operating with a damage-centered theory of change (see Tuck 2009).

Recalling the news story they found, Stephen said, “the town up river is experiencing, like, completely, a statistical anomaly in the number of cases of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and IBS,” Devin's three primary burn-pit-related diagnoses. Devin and Stephen had reason to believe that chloroprene was, in fact, one of the chemicals to which Devin was exposed. “Among other things,” Stephen said, “chloroprene makes Teflon, makes tires, and makes X, they burned it, makes Y, they burned it, makes Z...” speculating that Devin might have gone halfway around the world to be made ill not only by the same chemical that is killing people up the river, but by actual components that were produced in that very plant.

Devin and Stephen worried that their speculation would seem conspiratorial, and joked to me about the proverbial map on the wall adorned with red threads, threads that in this case might link Tokyo to LaPlace to Al Anbar. But there is, in fact, nothing conspiratorial in their thinking. While they've stumbled upon a perhaps unlikely connection, they do not impute any sinister motive or secret grand plan. In fact, they've done nothing other than attempt to follow the object, and in so doing, have made plain a late-industrial petrochemical infrastructure that crisscrosses the globe, a geography in which not only are we all generally swimming in toxic stew, but, more specifically, the industrial production of toxicity in LaPlace, Louisiana may be a dimension of, or a moment in, the violence of post-9/11 US war-making in Iraq. What Devin and Stephen offer us is a provocation to think about toxicity in LaPlace not only as “the slow violence of fast capitalism” (Gupta and Hecht 2017), but also the slow violence of fast violence, in which the toxicity of war and the toxicity of late-industrial capitalism coincide. And yet, while this keen attunement to petrochemical infrastructure and military logistics has led Devin to think of his (white) body as intimately and materially related to the bodies of those (mostly Black) environmental justice activists organizing against chloroprene in St. John Parish down the river, the logic of domestic security, and the exceptionalization of US soldier and veteran lives, obscures an even more immediate set of intimate and material relations—relations to the Iraqis who lived and breathed the same inky smoke and particulate matter that made Devin so sick. This is a set of relations that Devin did not mention, and that I also failed to ask about at the time.

In August 2019 I took the students in my Anthropology of Toxicity class on a tour of the Houston Ship Channel, an uncanny amenity offered for free by the port of Houston, the second busiest port in the nation. The port's official narrative was piped in over the loudspeaker while we took in what one student identified in a tweet as the “terrible beauty” of the industrial landscape (@alicetliu1, August 31, 2019)—the massive gleaming white chemical storage containers, tangled pipes, and soring smoke stacks of processing facilities offset against the clear blue of the summer sky.

Among other things, the loudspeaker voice told us that the demand for rubber, lubricant, and other oil products during WWII led to the precipitous growth of the oil and gas industry along the channel, which in turn required a significant dredging and expansion to accommodate larger boats and more traffic. It noted that a good many of the objects that populate our daily lives—“that chair you're sitting in,” the avuncular prerecorded voice said, “your shirt too, maybe even the coffee you're drinking now”—all came through the channel—widened for war and therefore welcoming to the industrial shipping of everything from mass-produced consumer goods to crumbling mountains of scrap metal.

In tracing the violent military history and contemporary life of global logistics, Deborah Cowen (2014, 27-30) notes that WWII marked the definitive shift from Napoleonic Wars in which a primary and pressing limitation was ensuring soldiers had enough calories to fight (soldiers, it was said, marched on their stomachs) to what are known as petrol, oil, and lubricant wars, in which industrialization and logistics drives martial possibility. What starts with the WWII effort to standardize shipping containers to transport military supplies across different modes of transportation (Levinson 2016, see also Cowen 2014, 31), blooms into city-sized forward operating bases with Pizza Huts, fully networked office buildings, bottled water, and disposable cutlery.

These logistical and material specificities are also shaped by political logics particular to the post-9/11 era, which includes a domestic securitization that makes wars that entail new forms of enclosure, comfort, and care for US soldier bodies—that idea that we should, as Dale put it, “build American cities” in Iraq so soldiers can “commute to war.” With its raced and gendered inflections, this contemporary imperative to care for US soldiers' health as we expose them to harm is conditioned by the lingering national guilt and about the treatment of US veterans in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. The spectacularization of chemical weapons in that war—including the notorious 1972 photo depicting then-nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked with other children after being severely burned by a napalm bomb—meant that Vietnamese (though not Laotian) and US military bodies were both figured as toxic subjects, linked together, if radically unequal.³ While there is much to be said about the different ways these wars have been mediated, I note here that in the current era, a post-Vietnam domestic imperative to care about and for post-9/11 US soldiers disregards “foreign” ecologies as well as those foreign subjects who live and strive and die within them.

The infrastructure of the pits is also shaped by a politico-temporal logic of “semi-permanence.” Not officially counted as overseas bases because they are semi-permanent, the bases the US constructed in Iraq after 2003 supplement the more permanent “bases of empire” (Lutz 2009) through which the US has projected its military influence around globe since the end of WWII. The absence of waste management infrastructure and the use of containerized housing units are two features that gave form to semi-permanence, allowing plausible deniability of charges that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in fact imperialist or, in the case of Iraq, an oil war whose real goal was securing both territory and the resources below it. And yet, the massiveness of the pits, and much of their contents—including abundant quantities of plastics from shipping packaging, paint cans, and sometimes entire vehicles—attest to an effort at place-making that seemed very permanent indeed. JBB, the base in Yathrib, Iraq, where Heather, Josh, and Dale had all been stationed and which had one of the largest and most well-known pits, is a particularly flagrant example. JBB had an airport, a major hospital, and an outpatient health clinic, a logistics hub comprised of warehouses that one veteran described to me as “huge, Amazon-like,” two swimming pools, three massive dining facilities, three bus routes, and a movie theater.

Dale, the former medic, remarked to me that the job of a logistics officer was knowing “how to move war.” It might be better said that military logistics is about how to move war in without thinking about how to move it out. Echoing this idea, Josh, who was involved in logistics at JBB, told me that there was no plan for what to do with stuff once it was no longer needed. He said that medical clinics full of specialized equipment, like radiology machines and Mark IV field hospital beds, were ceremonially handed over to Iraqi forces and then largely abandoned to be stripped for parts that would be sold on the local market. And because of the way military units rotate through bases, and the lag time in filling supply requests, shipments would arrive once the unit that requested them was on its way out, and would sit idle in those Amazon-sized warehouses, waiting to be needed. Despite dreams of logistical efficiency, or the Bataillan (1991) sense of war as an incendiary practice of dispensing of accrued excess, moving war in this way is also essentially a process of making excess. Rather than burning that excess off, the burn pits transform it through the process of combustion, a process that is not simply destructive but “above all...metamorphic” (Clark and Yussoff 2014, 212), transforming war's excess from solid and liquid into smoke and vapor, from stable to volatile compounds, from seemingly solid objects to anthropochemical entanglements that escape one's grasp only to be remapped onto a geography that reasserts the distinctions between home and away, foreign and domestic, distinctions that the practice of moving war both instantiate and bridge.

In the opening chapter of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe the germinating seeds of communist revolution nourished unknowingly by the bourgeoise's “constant revolutionizing” of the “instruments of production” ([1888] 1978, 476) They call forth the radical potential of this revolutionizing, a potential to transform both the technologies of production and the relations and cultural forms that articulate with them. They do this, in part, with a memorable phrase that conjures a transformation so profound, and so material, as to seem like magic: “All that is solid melts into air” (ibid).

The Marxist cultural critic Marshall Berman borrowed the phrase as the title of his 1981 book about “the experience of modernity.” Berman points us to infrastructures of modern urbanism, including highways, a form also central to the US's post-9/11 wars as arteries that were vital for supplies that fed the burn pits, and also as deadly hazards: throughout the wars, a majority of US casualties (roughly 60%) were caused by improvised explosive devices, many of them planted alongside, or underneath, highways. As Julie Livingston puts it in her parable of self-devouring growth, “the road giveth, and the road taketh away” (2019, 94).

It is not only the highway that modern logistical revolutionizing points us to but also, importantly, rivers. The Mississippi, for example, provided an earlier infrastructure for the movement of cotton and sugar wrought by enslaved laborers, which laid the pattern for the movement of goods that is part of the story of the pits. The chloroprene plant in LaPlace, for example, is built on the site of former sugar plantations strategically located along the Mississippi. In the eighteenth century, European colonists claimed the land in that area, exiling and decimating Indigenous nations, including the Chocktaw, Houma, and Natchez Peoples. The stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge—that area now known as Cancer Alley—was carved into slender plantations reaching out on both sides of the river toward the bayous that surrounded it, imprinting the land with the contours, as well as the blood, of racial capitalism (Allen 2006). After emancipation, some strips of plantation land were given to families of formerly enslaved Black people who had labored there, but more profitable plantations with more efficient and scalable shipping infrastructure remained in white hands Allen 2003, 7-13; cf. Bullard 2000). The smaller, less profitable plots given to Black families became the foundation of thriving Black communities, but were also rapidly transformed into sacrifice zones as the larger plantations industrialized, and then transitioned into petrochemical facilities once oil and natural gas were discovered nearby (Allen 2006; Colten 2006).

The Houston Ship Channel is part of this story, too. Now home to the second largest concentration of petrochemicals in the world, it was identified as a potential commercial route in part because of its proximity to New Orleans and the commercial traffic of the Mississippi by the Allen brothers of New York, who came speculating in the 1830s (Shelton 2017). They established the town of Houston along the bayou to attract commerce. When people complained that the bayou was not functional as a commercial route, it's said that the Allen brothers hired a team to move bales of cotton two miles along its narrow, muddy waters, and that it took the team two weeks to move these fetishized slave commodities along a bayou reluctant to be pressed into service. Nonetheless, that more or less settled the question of whether the waterway could be made a commercially viable ship channel. The dredging and expansion has been ongoing since then, punctuated by the intertwined exigencies of war and capital that gave rise to the great acceleration (“Ship Channel History,” n.d.).

At the same time that the Houston Ship Channel was being dredged and expanded for war and capital, another logistical form was being revolutionized: the standard shipping container, a solution to the military problem of moving massive quantities of material across the globe while transferring between roads, boats, and rails. Early iterations of the standardized shipping container were successfully used during WWII and then iterated into the familiar CONEX of the Korean War. But most histories point to the definitive start of containerization as Malcolm McLean's development in the mid-1950s of the containers we know today, easily liftable by crane, and paired with container ships specially designed to fit them (Levinson 2016). The first such ship was a repurposed military vessel which, in 1956, McLean loaded with a cargo of oil and fifty-eight containers and sent on its way from Elizabeth, New Jersey, down the east coast, into the Gulf of Mexico, and up to its final destination—the Port of Houston—through the widened petrochemical-logistical embrace of the ship channel.

The container system that McLean designed is now essential to the global flow of commodities, and to all the distributions and displacements of toxicity that flow entails, including all the creature comforts, communications technologies, plastic water bottles, packing materials, and machine parts that fill the burn pits. And the containers themselves are used as semi-permanent buildings on semi-permeant bases, as everything from offices to the ubiquitous containerized housing units (CHU) in which most solders slept, two or four beds to a CHU depending on rank.

When I asked Dale to tell me a little about his CHU and the stuff it in, he told me that people really went to town decorating their otherwise spartan spaces given that there was little else to do for entertainment. He had plastic lawn chairs out front of his. Some folks had even gotten their hands on lawn ornaments. He'd built himself a bookcase out of empty paint cans and some unused planks of wood. He remembered something and then laughed to himself. “I had a fucking couch,” he said. I asked him how he'd gotten it, and he couldn't quite remember, but, speculating, he said, “It probably came from China,” and then imagined out loud that the couch would have been loaded into a shipping container and onto a boat, and would have made it to Iraq, and gotten loaded on to a truck, that would have driven along those highways of death and through the gates at JBB, where it ended up in his CHU. I asked him what happened to it when he left. He said he wasn't sure if anyone else took it, but that eventually, one way or another, it would have ended up in the burn pit, its petrochemical-based foam interior transforming into toxic smoke, its remains leaching into the irrigation canal that ran within one hundred feet of the pit.

The revolution in logistics of which the standardized shipping container was a key part is certainly an instance of that “constant revolutionizing” of the instruments of production that Marx and Engels described. And it may be that they have a certain aspect of the revelatory power that Marx and Engels had hoped: that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Perhaps this is part of what happens when soldiers and contractors sickened by burn pit smoke take their case to the Supreme Court, as they attempted to do in 2019 (Lawrence 2019). But while the perverse infrastructural loop of the pits may have given rise to a sober confrontation with certain conditions of soldier exposure, the question of relations, and of who constitutes one's kind, remains obscured. It seems that all that is solid does not melt into air but, instead, burns into smoke.

Like the other veterans I've talked to who spent time at JBB, Dale, whose asthma and sleep apnea are likely connected to his burn pit exposure, described the position of the burn pit there as poorly chosen. He gave me a virtual tour of the site on his phone, using a Google satellite image. He said that sometimes, when the smoke was especially thick, insurgents would use it as cover and set up mortars in the Iraqi town on the other side. Like others, he also noted that because it was situated along the northeastern edge of the base, strong southerly winds would periodically blanket half the base in acrid smoke.

In such accounts, the burn pits reveal slow violence that unfolds alongside the fast. Yet at the same time as they might extend the temporality of war violence, such accounts tend to stop at the edges of the US bases where US veterans lived, as if the environment of the base constituted a closed ecology. It will come as no surprise that the military's scant burn-pit-related environmental testing did the same thing, only sampling on base at JBB (National Academy of Sciences 2011), and attempting to disaggregate pollutants arising from the pits from those portrayed as endemic to the Iraqi environment, as if that environment were not infused with the remains of generations of US-led war (Wool 2017). These cuts between Iraqi and US bodies and environments also characterizes US-based media coverage and advocacy efforts, which focus almost exclusively on health effects in the bodies of US veterans, despite mounting clinical evidence of the environmental illnesses linked to US occupation there (Dewachi 2013; Rubaii 2020; Savabieasfahani et al. 2016), and the work of both international and local environmental activist projects working to remediate the environmental damage done by decades of war, and to protect the health of Iraq's waterways in particular (Yathrib Project 2020; “Waterkeepers Iraq,” n.d.).⁴

As Dale looked at that Google satellite image of the landscape that had been the base, the landscape began to refuse those cuts, to make connections. He scanned the image, looking for the remains of a flimsy barrier that been built along the edge of the pit but could see only the dark impression in the earth of where it used to be. Reading the image while recalling the landscape from his memory, he remembered the canal right on the other side of where the pit and the fence had been. A canal, he remembered, that had been a popular spot where locals would cool off on hot days. A canal, he realized, that would be contaminated with everything the pits had made. A canal, that he thought probably ran right into the Tigris River.

When I have asked them about burn pits, US veterans have articulated all kinds of surprising relations, relations that we might think of as chemical kinship. Devin articulates a relation with people near the chloroprene plant in LaPlace, like seventy-seven-year-old Robert Taylor, retired contractor and leader of the Concerned Citizens of St. John Parish. Josh, who is “100 percent certain” his military exposures will give him cancer, articulates a kind of chemical kinship with me, who spent the days of the Deer Park fire anxiously watching fluctuations in local levels of particulate matter. But, aside from the incipient realization the canal gave to Dale, none of the veterans I've interviewed have yet articulated such kinship with Iraqi civilians, their reckonings with chemical kinship deeply shaped by a logic of domestic security that cleaves foreign from domestic, reproducing a globally racialized spacialization of home and away, and disavowing chemical kinship that crosses that divide.

This is not to say that these veterans don't care about Iraqis. The question of what it means—ethically, politically—for US veterans to “care about Iraqis'”is murky and difficult, and I will not wade into it here. But I will note that as my work on the burn pits has shifted from focusing on US veteran illnesses to linking US veteran experiences of exposure to Iraqi ones, my US veteran interlocutors have been enthusiastic to contribute to this effort and surprised by the obviousness of this overlooked kinship.⁵ What this seems to point to is that the ways we have come to know about the toxicity of burn pits make certain relations seem more available and others less so. This remains the case as burn-pit-related illnesses becomes more well known in the US, a consequence of decades of advocacy from veteran groups, as well as personal investment from President Joe Biden, whose son, Beau Biden, died from a brain cancer that may have been connected to his own burn pit exposure. To give but one example, the pits—and their likely connection to Beau Biden's death—featured in President Biden's 2022 State of the Union Address, in which he also announced a range of new supports for veterans exposed to them. But—in the midst of a speech that opened with the lauding of Ukrainian's resisting the Russian invasion—his only mention of Iraq was as a place where US soldiers had once been made sick. This, I think, is evidence of the epistemic violence of the double logic of domestic security—the racialized and colonial distinction of domestic vs. foreign and the invocation of the domestic as an exclusive space for the reproduction and care of kin.

The ubiquity of toxicity and the global reach of petrochemical infrastructure makes it possible to link US military toxicity overseas to exposures at home. But the flip side of these abundant connections can be a set of occlusions—occlusions that reassert well-trod racial geographies. But an infrastructure of toxicity, like that in which the burn pits are so spectacularly nestled, contains other possibilities too, possibilities for what Mel Chen (2011) identifies as the queer bonds that toxicity forges across racial divides and divergent locations in toxic commodity chains. Precisely in its ubiquity and extensiveness, this toxic infrastructure crosscuts the distinction between foreign and domestic, between the biopolitically preserved and the necropolitically disregarded. This is what I've been after here, a flickering of not-yet-claimed checmical kinship, as I think about the relations that are made and unmade between smoke and bodies, between the Tigris and the Missisippi, between fast and slow violence, between the materialities of war and the materialities of late-industrial capitalism, between moving war, moving slave commoddities of sugar and cotton, and moving Chinese-manufactured couches.

While the biggest of the pits no longer burn, they still continue to produce new ways to apprehend the extensiveness of contemporary US war violence, and the relations forged through it. This is the trick of the pits: that, despite their stated purpose, they refuse to contain the waste of war-making and its excesses. Instead, they dispurse it in nervous systems and respiratory systems and bowels and rivers, stoking new analytics to remind us that where there is smoke, there are new relations to be made.

² Those with on base jobs were derisively called “POGs,” Person Other than Grunt. The feminized implication of these “stay-at-home” soldiers tracks closely with the raced and gendered suburban spatialization that Dale's comment points to.

³ In her account of the extensive chemical relations between the US war in Vietnam and contemporary practices and chemopolitics of race and beauty, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (2021) also points to many other forms of unclaimed chemical kinship to dioxin-exposed US veterans, including the largely Black men incarcerated at Holmesburgh prison experimented on by Dr. Albert Kligman in his work for Dow Chemical (which produced both napalm and Agent Orange) and the US Department of Defense, which was central to extending and expanding the use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.

⁴ In contrast to efforts like Waterkeepers Iraq, which seeks to monitor and protect waterways while also renewing intergenerational relations to the landscape, anthropologist Bridget Guarasci (2015) points out the way that environmental restoration—particularly of the country's southern marshlands—has been co-opted as tool of US occupation.

⁵ My work on the burn pits began in 2017 with funding from the VA's War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, in partnership with anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish. We started with questions of diagnosis, and expanded to questions of logistics and infrastructure I take up here. With Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funding, we are now collaborating with anthropologist Kali Rubaii, whose Iraq-based work explores the environmental derangement of US occupation. The work of putting US and Iraqi experiences into relation would not be possible without such a collaborative approach.

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Zoë H Wool is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the TWIG Research Kitchen at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where she teaches courses on topics ranging from the anthropology of toxicity to gender and disability. She is the author of After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015).